Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon
Chapter 184: Trial of Craft

After a few moments of blackness, Tulland found himself in the white room.

“I’m sorry,” the note-taking Infinite said. “That you had to go through that.”

“Are you?” Tulland asked. “Because you planned it.”

“Not like that. It was supposed to push you to your limits. But it wasn’t supposed to be like that.”

“Oh, come on. You know what Halter is. You must have known how much he’d enjoy that.”

For the first time since Tulland had met him, the note-taker Infinite put down his pad and paper and leaned forward.

“Tulland, listen to me. I’m an ordered being. I understand almost everything, but I struggle with insanity. At that level of insane, there are no patterns for me to understand. That man’s mind was influenced to help you with training as much as possible, but nothing I can do could have matched that level of hatred. There was no way for me to know until it was too late.”

“Well, it’s too late now.” Tulland motioned around the room. “It’s nice to see you at least are giving a debriefing before your little experiment in dungeons dooms everyone I know. A little pit stop before I’m reincarnated.”

“What?” The man looked taken aback. “Oh, no. I should have led with that. Tulland, you aren’t dead.”

“Sure. Even though I felt it happen, on my last life between now and reincarnation.”

“That was a little trick of the language. It really was your last death before you are reincarnated.” The man looked apologetic. “Again, I had no idea how terrible that was going to be. That test was about your reaction to a force you couldn’t defeat. You did fine, as such things go. You didn’t give up. You didn’t panic. It wasn’t supposed to be… you know. What it became.”

“What was it supposed to be?”

“Imagine if it was with Brist. You would have died, but it would have taken minutes. An hour at the most. Halter toyed with you.”

“I’m not forgiving this.”

The Infinite shook his head. “We aren’t asking you to. I’d honestly release you from this now if there wasn’t good left to get. I can assure you that nothing left in this dungeon will be remotely like that. There isn’t even any combat left.”

“Then what?”

“Just go and see. I doubt you’d trust me now, anyway.”

—

For the first time in the five-layer dungeon, Tulland found himself in a place he recognized. Or, at least, he recognized who had made it. This was a green place, full of plants both known and unknown to him. They could have been from anywhere and grown by anyone. There was only one person, however, who could have pruned them that way.

“Oh, no. Not you again.” Tulland locked eyes with the ancient woman, who was beaming. “I thought I got rid of you once and for all last time, boy.”

“No, I guess not.” Tulland grinned. He didn’t know many people. However difficult this woman was, it was good to see an old friend. “I turn up all over.”

“So I’ve heard. Or have been taught. Whatever made me know about it without having been there.” The old woman tapped her head. “Is this Infinite as troublesome a person as he seems?”

“As they seem, yes. Absolutely. But they did send me back here, which is good. Because I have some questions only you can answer.”

Trial of Craft Like the Trial of Intellect, this is not a trial in the truest sense of the world. Rather, it’s an opportunity to gain whatever you can gain. As in other trials, the person before you is the truest, most powerful version of themselves The Infinite could provide. The fact that this means that this woman is the same as she was the last time you met her can be taken however you like to take it. You have one day to consult with this expert, during which you may learn whatever you are able to comprehend and whatever you can convince her to tell you. She cannot and will not be coerced in any way.

“Ha. Can’t be coerced,” Tulland laughed.

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“What, child?”

“The Infinite is saying it can’t force you to do anything.”

“Of course it can’t, Tulland. Nobody ever could.” She smiled. “How long do we have?”

“About a day.”

“Then come along. I’ll feed you. You look like death.” The old woman smiled. “You can tell me about it.”

—

An hour later, Tulland was full. He had expected the old woman to feed him only plants, but this time there was some meat in the soup she made, as well as some bread to eat alongside it. He didn’t know how much of the flavor of the soup was from her cooking skill and how much was from her sheer skill at creating the highest quality ingredients, but it was delicious either way.

“So you died and died, in the most terrible way possible.” The old woman shook her head. “I never did trust that The Infinite dungeon. Seems I was a bit right. That’s just careless.”

“I don’t know.” Tulland set down his spoon and rubbed his temples. “You remember that I used to get in my own mind a lot?”

“Hard to forget.”

“I have a System in there. My whole world’s System. If you can believe that.”

“Here we are, in this place, under these circumstances. I can believe a lot. Tulland.”

“Well, it’s not here right now, so I can say this. I don’t think it understands humans. Not really. It’s getting there, but it understands us about as well as you and I understand plants. We know a lot about them, and we can always learn more, but we aren’t plants. We can’t always predict how they will react.”

“So you think The Infinite didn’t understand what having you hunted again and again would do?”

“Not until it saw what happened. I think.” Tulland leaned back in his chair and let out a frustrated breath. “Or maybe it did and it’s a jerk. It’s hard to say.”

“At least it sent you here. I saw you looking at my plants, earlier. Our last lesson, I was trying to get you to look at them that way. Something changed in you that I hope we can take advantage of.”

“I saw the fundamental force of the universe that drives growth. Tends to change a person.”

“I bet.” The woman stood, frowning at her wrinkled legs as she creaked into motion. “Come on, then. We’ll see what we can teach you.”

—

Hours and hours later, Tulland wasn’t sure he could have pointed to a single fact the woman taught him. It was almost the opposite from what his time reading books about plants in the unending library had been, and she was almost the exact opposite kind of person when compared to Potter.

As an alternative to memorizing dry facts, the woman would point to things. Sometime this was the look of a leaf, and sometimes the trimming work she had done on a twig. Then she’d ask Tulland what he thought about them. At first, it had seemed like there was no wrong answer to those questions, that he’d just been asked so they could compare notes. That illusion was shattered when she smacked him in the back of his head after a particularly shaky answer about a shrub he didn’t quite get.

“Sorry!” Tulland said, rubbing the back of his skull. The woman lacked all the tools it would take to actually hurt him, so nothing hurt except his pride. “I wasn’t sure if these were the kinds of questions I could get wrong.”

“If they weren’t, you wouldn’t need me.” The woman kneeled next to the shrub. “You are more powerful than me. With the plants, I mean. Did you know that?”

“I’m not sure.” Tulland had seen the woman work a dozen marvels he couldn’t even approach that day, healing defects in plants or growing entirely new ones in a blink. “It doesn’t seem like it, anyway.”

“Don’t be fooled. You have probably twice the brute force I have. When you tell the plants to do something, they try much harder to do it for you than they would for me. It’s beyond my understanding how much you’ve done in changing them to new forms. You are my master in many ways.”

“If you say so.”

“I do. But you are a fool when it comes to working with the plants. An absolute fool.”

“I thought I was better, this time around.”

“You are. You could hardly have been worse. But I need you to focus on what I’m trying to teach you. If you weren’t always fighting with the plant and could work with them, the wonders you could accomplish would be well beyond anything I ever hoped for myself. It’s just that you don’t have much of a knack for it, as things stand today.”

Tulland couldn’t argue. He had never loved plants until his class had made him, and even that had been slow-going.

“Now reapply yourself, here, to what we are doing,” the old woman continued. “If you give me a chance, I’ll teach you how to feel a bit of what these plants are.”

“And then wonders?”

She smacked him in the back of the head.

“And then, if we are very lucky, you will have the foundation to build something on. If we are very, very lucky indeed.”

The next hours were a blur. Tulland answered question after question, slowly getting a higher and higher percentage of them right. He understood a bit more about how branches should grow here, and a bit more about how many leaves needed to be on them there.

None of the information was universal. Every plant was a bit different. But, like his tutor, he was slow developing a sort of universal sense of how things should be that, even when wrong in the particulars, was still broadly right in concept. With some minor successes in his pocket, he gained a bit of enthusiasm for the task, grinding out answer after answer until his eyelids began to get heavy.

He awoke with a start when the old woman hit him again.

“Sorry! I’m sorry!” Tulland rubbed the point of impact and tried to look contrite. “I’ll get right back on it.”

“Not much time for that now, I’m afraid. By the time we got back into the rhythm of things, we’d be parting ways.” She handed him a glass of what looked like juice. “Here. I squeezed this for you while you were napping. Take it. You deserve it.”

Tulland took a drink and almost cried from the pure satisfaction of it. There had to be more than one fruit in there, he thought. He could feel the nutrition in it seeping into his veins.

“I did well?” Tulland sounded almost pathetically hopeful, even to his own ears. “I learned a lot?”

“No. But you aren’t very good at learning, which I suspect you know. I’ve had students who would have gladly suffered a week of that kind of study if I didn’t stop them. You did well by your standards, however.”

“Better than last time?”

“Much.” The woman sipped at her own drink. “And yet, I think you probably don’t know what any of this is for.”

“For?” Tulland hadn’t even thought about it. “I figured I’d pump these ideas into the plants. Make them better.”

He managed to duck when the old woman struck at him this time.

“No, fool. That’s your way of doing things. I had hoped your old way. There’s something to it, but it can’t be every paint in your palette. What I’ve given you is… oh, I know how to get it through your head. A passive skill.”

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